I've been a software developer for the better part of my life.
This interest started when my dad bought a Commodore 64 and subscribed us to Compute! magazine - which always included working code in pages and pages of text. Code which would be painstakingly hand-entered ... back in the days prior to word processors and most definitely prior to the incredibly full-featured Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) such as Visual Studio that ease development with features such as Intellisense.
In fact, my first code was always written on notepad. "In Notepad, you mean?" Er, no. A notepad, paper and pencil - which I handed to my dad who would type it in - and even do some basic debugging - for me.
As a kid, I always sucked at sports, presumably because *my* dad never played catch with me, never really tossed a football back and forth with me... I kind of grew up resenting that lack of fatherly attention as a kid, watching the popular guys around me in little league and other sporting endeavors. Now, almost two decades removed from school, I look back and think about all the ways he encouraged, helped, and pushed me to learn to program computers, and where he never had time to toss a ball with me, that time was spent working two jobs so he could afford to buy me my -own- Commodore C64D (the cooler one with the better sound chip), and even spent his tired, late nights after work hacking all my scrawled code in.
Thanks, Dad, for that. It took me a while to understand what that meant, but... thanks. Of all the pop-culture influences and other things that made programming "cool" to me, it was his effort that really made me a developer.
Which finally brings me here. It's about time I share what I've learned - or, at least, about time that I record what's in my head. If not just to be able to remember it later for my own use...
